It can be hard at times, fitting Zeroism into a busy life. Turns out this whole masters thing is less about watching Supermarket Sweep and more about reading every word ever written about social work. Meanwhile the world’s missed out on a blog entry and my usual epic do-gooding, delaying the revolution for 7 days and putting us back to October 2014. But while changing the world from the confines of the library is not without its challenges, it can be done. I’ve spent the week signing online petitions.

I assume you just raised your eyes and thought about smirking but bear with me here. Petitions don’t have the greatest reputation in the world. They whiff of vanity, of active-looking inaction where people who know nothing about an issue sign their name, do nothing else and figure they’ve fixed a problem. They whiff of pettiness, of overuse that attaches them to a range of causes meaning for every ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ we have a ‘Free cocktail sausages for overworked backing dancers’. A quick trawl around Facebook and Petitions Online flags petitions demanding a Primark be built in Warrington that The People might buy cheap clothing, a Street Fighter mixtape be released that The People might boogie, and a non-animated 3-D Pokemon movie be made for some reason. There’s a petition calling for us to worship Lucy Lawless’s feet and toes, and millions of petitions demanding paedophiles be tarred, feathered, burned, skinned, raped, tortured, told off, killed, shot, stabbed and banned from swimming pools, biscuit factories and Wii tennis tournaments. There’s no denying it. Petitions are the A-bombs of activist tools: they’ve been useful, but now they’re in the hands of complete dickheads things are getting scary.

If petitions are going to work – and they can, sometimes – they need to be credible and have a route to the people who can actually bring about change. With that in mind I started with Save the Children’s ‘Press for Change’ thing. They were looking for 100,000 signatures for their petition calling on the UK government to kick ass at the UN summit and big up tackling the preventable diseases that kill about two million children a year in developing countries. They managed 63,000 signatures and were aiming to take them to Nick Clegg to ensure the government sticks to its part for the Millennium Development Goals and tells everyone else to do that same.

That done, I visited Amnesty International. They’re always good for a petition. They offered me the case for Ramze Shihab Ahmed who is being held in detention in Iraq without charge. Amnesty reckons he’s one of about 30,000 who’ve been imprisoned, tortured and generally dicked around. We can email William Hague and have him tell Iraq to cut that shit out. Then there’s the case of Patrick Okoroafor, sentenced to death for a robbery at the age of 14. Amnesty says they’ve helped reduce the sentence but he still faces 24 years in prison. We can contact the Nigerian authorities and tell them we’re not having that either.

Still, it’s hard to know if these things make a difference. When he hit New York, Nick Clegg told the UN, “We will keep our promises, and we expect the rest of the international community to do the same.” Save the Children took the credit and thanked its supporters for saving millions of lives. Seems a bit specious to me; two things happening doesn’t mean one causes the other but we can agree even if we can’t connect specific results to specific petitions we can connect progress to movements, and keeping the Million Development Goals talked about is a good thing. Nick Clegg said something nice, whether we can take credit for it or not.

It’s just a shame he was forgotten slightly after some gobby maniac from Iran mouthed off about 9/11, nuclear weapons and Lucy Lawless’s crap feet, but as with our petitions it’s the thought that counts.

The whole point of this Zero lark is that with a little bit of thought we can do good in whatever we happen to be doing, be it eating a banana (Fairtrade/organic), eating veal (not doing) or embezzling funds from a Lebanese orphanage (carbon offsetting your extradition flight). And so it is for yer man today as he starts back at university.

I’ve been stocking up on supplies, giving thought to the environment and my fellow humans, singing Julian Lennon songs under my breath and strutting like an all-round right-on son of a Bono. I’ve bought a recycled lever arch file, recycled writing pads and degradable poly pockets. I’m getting to the campus by bus, subway and the occasional walk, leaving my car rusting by the side of the road like the polluting anachronism it is. And I’m using the library and buying second hand textbooks to cut down on the trees we cut down for new books.

My laptop case is made from recycled bottles on the outside, recycled foam on the inside and came wrapped in a recycled paper sleeve printed with soya-based inks. And then there’s my flash drive. It’s made from bamboo, one of the world’s most sustainable materials, to avoid wasting more plastic and metal. It’s so right on if it assumed human form it’d be the director of a disabled lesbian interpretive dance troupe.

To pay for all that I’ll need a student account with a colossal overdraft so I’ve signed up with a bank whose vigorous ethical policy means they won’t invest their cash “in any government or business which fails to uphold basic human rights within its sphere of influence”, “any business whose links to an oppressive regime are a continuing cause for concern” or “any business involved in the manufacture or transfer of armaments to oppressive regimes”. That’ll do just fine.

And with that I’m off to chug a brewski in a toga, watch Countdown on an ironic basis and see about scoring a bag of this Chlamydia I keep hearing about.

Contrary to what you might read about me in the press, the blogosphere and on the walls of a number of men’s toilets in the Chichester area this site aims only to tell the truth; to learn the truth about things and then share it with the world. There’ll be no whitewash here, no sugarcoating, no bright sides or spin. If things I try go badly I’ll admit it because the truth is too precious to discard for the sake of a lousy blog entry.

In unrelated news our potatoes are ready to harvest and have been an astonishing success.

It’s been fascinating to watch nature at work, from planting seed potatoes in sacks to composting with worm poop, from forgetting to water them to leaving them for dead while I was in Nepal. After the money spent on the sacks, the seeds, the feed and the soil and the time spent planting, watering, feeding and nurturing them it’s been incredibly gratifying to finally dig them up and dig in. They were full on proper tasty, fresh from the earth and some of them larger than your average marble. The three sacks yielded enough potatoes for four meals. That’s exactly the amount of meals I was hoping for. I was hoping for four meals.

Yes, it’s been a great success. And they were absolutely delicious, as were the tomatoes that grew on the window sill and took up half the living room window all summer. We’ve eaten six of them now. Six tomatoes and four servings of potatoes. It’s all been very encouraging. Next year I’m sure to grow those sons of bitches again even if there’s no direct sunlight in our yard, even if it does mean unlocking and relocking two doors every time I go to water them, even if the shared yard is a bit creepy and mouldy and smells of lard.

In fact I’m thinking of going beyond potatoes next year. I’m going to grow mangoes. I’m going to grow mangoes and bananas until nature bows down before me, calls me Sir and apologises for all its hilarious mischief.

Your world has been rocked, no doubt, by the apparent delay in announcing the Charity of the Month. You sit at your computer on or around the 15th of every month, hitting the refresh button with increasing anxiety to learn where we should direct our payday donations. I’ve kept you waiting there for over two weeks leading to disciplinaries at work, broken marriages at home and stood up mistresses at motels. While I apologise for the upset, distress and scandal caused I had good reason: I don’t get paid no more.

Freed from the tyranny of payday we can now go by calendar months instead. It’s a far tidier system which, like decimalisation, may take some time to adjust to but will make life easier for the dim. All of which brings us to the grand announcement: it’s the DEC.